MAGA World and the Western Hemisphere
Trump’s foreign policy unites the hawkish and restrainer wings of his coalition.
By Walter Russell Mead
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the media in Panama City, Feb. 3. Photo: mark schiefelbein/ReutersNot since Ronald Reagan and congressional Democrats battled over aid to the opponents of Nicaragua’s pro-Soviet Sandinista dictatorship has the Western Hemisphere played this large a role in American news or has the region so fixated the American president.
More has happened in hemispheric politics in the past two weeks than sometimes happens in a year.
President Trump had hardly reinstalled his Diet Coke button on the Resolute Desk when he doubled down on threats to take back the Panama Canal.
After Colombia rejected American deportation flights in military aircraft, what some persist in labeling an “isolationist” threatened harrowing consequences unless the flights were allowed.
Bogotá folded.
Even as those disputes swirled, Mr. Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell returned from Venezuela with six American hostages and word of a thaw in the icy relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela’s thuggish but potentially oil-rich government.
While Mr. Grenell was flying home, Mr. Trump was readying an order to levy tariffs of up to 25% on most Canadian and all Mexican exports to the U.S.
Reaction to the diplomatic blitzkrieg was decidedly mixed.
Leaders and many ordinary people in Canada, Mexico and Panama expressed outrage.
Canadian hockey and basketball fans booed the American national anthem.
Mexican politicians competed to denounce Mr. Trump’s tariffs on their country’s burgeoning exports to El Norte.
In Panama, demonstrators chanted anti-American slogans.
In New York, stock markets swooned.
Farther afield, European diplomats gasped in horror at the evidence that four years out of power had given Mr. Trump more confidence in his unorthodox economic ideas and made him more determined to carry them out.
What China and Russia make of it is harder to say.
One suspects that both countries worry about Mr. Trump’s energetic approach to international relations while seeking to exploit any cracks in American alliances that result from allied dismay at Trump 2.0.
After his initial meetings in Washington with the Japanese, Indian and Australian foreign ministers demonstrated the centrality of the Indo-Pacific in American foreign policy, freshly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio immediately turned to the Western Hemisphere.
His first foreign trip, currently under way, takes him to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.
This hectic hemispheric focus isn’t a fluke.
Washington’s renewed attention to the neighborhood may be controversial in Ottawa and Mexico City, but hemispheric policy is a sweet spot for the Trump administration.
We will see more of it.
For MAGA-world, the Western Hemisphere is where the action is.
If your top issues are migration and drug trafficking, then Mexico and the Caribbean are where you want the federal government at work.
Confronting neighboring states over drug trafficking while insisting they accept deportees are essential steps for an America-first foreign policy.
Including Canada on the list of tariff targets is perhaps the most controversial of the administration’s hemispheric policy steps, but it strengthens Mr. Trump’s hold on different wings of his sprawling coalition.
A fight with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau energizes the MAGA culture warriors who see the Canadian Liberal leader as a poster child for fanatical wokeism.
The Canada tariffs also reassure pro-Trump Hispanics—whose support helped the president return to the White House—that his agenda isn’t driven by anti-Latino xenophobia.
The administration’s assertive hemispheric policy also unites the hawkish and restrainer wings of the Trump coalition.
Even isolationists like the Monroe Doctrine.
Focusing on Chinese penetration of countries such as Panama (for instance, penalizing Chinese imports to force greater cooperation over fentanyl suppression) is an anti-China measure that restrainers also applaud.
A hemisphere-first policy could pay political dividends for the president.
Change in Cuba and Nicaragua, where socialism has both economically and ideologically reached the end of the road, may be closer than many think.
The phenomenon of Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele’s stunning success in El Salvador suggest that Mr. Trump can find allies who back some of his unconventional ideas.
The rising tide of Pentecostal Christianity across the region may herald a cultural convergence between Mr. Trump’s America and many of its neighbors.
Team Trump is right that smart hemispheric policy can shore up the foundations of American security in a challenging world.
But many of our neighbors depend on economic lifelines (such as remittances from migrants and access to the rich U.S. market) that Mr. Trump’s policies threaten.
On Monday morning, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said the Trump tariffs will be delayed for a month.
Mr. Trudeau said the same on Monday afternoon.
There is still a chance Mr. Trump’s “big stick” regional tariffs won’t come into force.
Whatever happens on the trade front, Secretary Rubio’s first trip to the region won’t be his last.
We should all wish him well.
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